What are the best ways to track brand mentions in ai search for 2026?

[charlesrich]

Traditional social listening tools don't seem to work well when it comes to "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO). I’m looking for the best ways to track brand mentions in ai search results specifically. It’s one thing to see your site ranking in the top 10 on Google, but it’s much harder to see if ChatGPT or Claude is actually recommending your product in a conversational thread. I’ve heard about tools like Ziptie and simple manual monitoring, but are there any automated scripts or API-based solutions that can scan Perplexity or Gemini at scale? I need a way to report these "mentions" to my stakeholders so they understand our brand’s share of voice in the AI space.

 

[AngieMacal]

Traditional tracking is definitely dead for this. You need to look at tools like Passionfruit or Siftly. They don’t just check rankings but actually run the prompts to see if your brand is mentioned in the conversational text. Passionfruit is great for tracking share of voice across ChatGPT and Claude because it gives you a literal percentage of how often you’re the recommended choice compared to competitors.

 

[ArthurMex]

Try using Nightwatch or SE Ranking's new AI visibility toolkit. They have automated the process of scanning Perplexity and Gemini. You can upload a list of a hundred prompts and it will spit out a report showing where you were cited with a link and where you were just mentioned as a text entity. It makes reporting to stakeholders way easier because you can show a "Citation Share" graph.

 

[Evelinawright]

If you want an API solution you should check out Profound AI. It is built for enterprise and has a solid API that lets you scan LLM responses at scale. It even uses synthetic personas to see how different types of users get different brand recommendations. It is a bit pricey but it is the closest thing to a "Google Search Console" for generative AI right now.

 

[Olivier]

I’ve been using Ziptie for a few months and it’s the best for seeing the actual source of the mention. It shows you which of your site pages are actually being used by the AI to form the answer. If the stakeholders want to know why you aren't showing up you can show them exactly which pages are missing the "GEO" optimization that the models prefer.

 

[Ragnar Lothbrok]

The reality is that most of these tools are just wrappers for automated browser scripts. If you have a dev team you can build a basic version using Puppeteer or Playwright to scrape Perplexity. The problem is that LLMs are non-deterministic so you have to run the same prompt five times to get a real average. Most people just pay for a tool like LLMrefs to handle that headache.

 

[captainghost]

Don't sleep on Ahrefs Brand Radar. They recently added a feature that specifically tracks brand mentions in AI search. It’s nice because it keeps everything in one dashboard with your traditional SEO. It won't give you deep conversational analysis like the niche tools but for a high-level share of voice report for the board it usually does the trick.

 

[jameswill8520]

If you are looking for something more budget-friendly look at Otterly AI. It focuses on the "Brand Visibility Index" which is a single metric you can hand over to your manager. It tracks ChatGPT and Perplexity daily so you can see if a recent PR push actually changed the way the models talk about your brand in real time.

 

[Lugwig]

One thing to watch for is the sentiment. It’s one thing to be mentioned but if Claude is mentioning your brand as a "cheap alternative" that’s a problem. Tools like Knowatoa specialize in the sentiment of the mention. They use the BISCUIT framework to rank how "authoritative" the AI thinks your brand is which is a killer metric for stakeholders.

 

[Ghausmakin]

Manual monitoring is still the only way to get the full picture sometimes. I keep a spreadsheet of 20 "golden prompts" and run them once a week across everything. It’s slow but it helps me see the "why" behind the AI's logic. Automated tools are getting better but they sometimes miss the nuance of how a brand is being compared to a rival in a long chat thread.

 

[TaylorTravels]

You can actually use Gemini’s own API to check for mentions of your brand across other platforms if you feed it the right data. But honestly for scale you want a dedicated GEO tool. Brand24 has also pivoted into this space and they now track mentions across seven different LLMs. It’s probably the easiest one to set up if you are already used to social listening dashboards.